These Are the Most Popular Holiday Gifts In Each State

Gearing up for the Shopping Olympics (aka Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, Cyber Week)? You might want to check your gift list against what other shoppers might try to fight you for. Here are the most-wanted holiday gifts, by state.

Using Google Trends data for gift searches over the last five years, the team at Treetopia has mapped our most popular holiday gift wish lists by state — an at-a-glance view showing how different regions and states compare, and a microcosm of how our gifting must-haves change over time. (In this case, from 2012 to 2016).

Shocking probably to no one, tech gifts topped the list every year, with the iPhone the #1 most-searched gift (at 30 times over the last five years), followed by laptops and tablets. Bucking one of the fastest-growing retail trends for the last decade, old-school "Of the Month Clubs" beat out more modern monthly subscription boxes 11 to 3, respectively, in total #1 searches. (Cue National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation.) And, bless their Bon-Jovi-and-Boss-loving hearts, New Jersey was the only state with wine gift baskets as its most popular gift search term — not just once, but every year from 2012 through 2014.

Because I've now been a gift-giving adult living in Texas for nearly half the time I was shopping in my home state of Massachusetts, I thought it'd be fun to compare the two — one "red" and one "blue", if you will:

My Bay State homies were downright Puritanically practical with investing in tech gifts (now that tech dominates most industries in the Commonwealth); whereas Texans went big three out of five years with perfume as their #1 gift, not at all eyebrow-raising since it's above 90 degrees every day here for more than half the year, so yay for common decency, y'all.